A faint whine starts, fizzing slightly. The bottle is empty, but I bring it up to my ear, and sure enough, there’s some of those wonderful gingery bubbles escaping.

And it takes me back to a time, not so long ago, when I used to write on the blog a lot more than I did now. I used to write most every day, and come up with some zany crazy and cool ideas about development. Lately said posts have been fewer, and farther between.

I’d say though, that it’s a seasonal thing, like the tides (seasonal?). I’ll come round again to posting a lot, it’s just I’ve settled into a groove at the moment, and it fits.

Anyway, back to the bottle.

Straight away I thought .. Why don’t we program carbonated water into our programs?

Then I thought, what the bewhillikers does that mean?

Now I’m trying to come up with an answer while writing this post. Ha ha.

.. is an example of onomatopoeia, derived from the sound the multiple bubbles make together as they "pop" when they escape.

People like fizz. We know this. Without the drink itself, fizz wouldn’t be much at all. Who really likes fizzy mineral water (apart from pregnant wives who hunger for it for weeks, then suddenly cannot stand the sight of it, heh heh)?

So we have the drink. And we have the fizz.

We have our application. And we have fizz.

The fizz, in our year of 2006 and on into next year no doubt, is .. Web 2.0. It’s Ajax (still). RSS, Blogging, Wikipedia, Youtube, Myspace. It’s whatever makes people pay attention, sit up, invest money, and want to know about. It’s the hollywood of technology. The Hollyology if you will. Or the technowood (hmmm). And I reckon we need to put a little more time into jumping onto the bandwagon than staying true and pure and never listening to what direction the world at large is taking.

This means, spending an hour to think about how RSS to could be implemented into your system, to add the FIZZ that the extra percentage of people will grab a hold of. How could you morph a little of the YouTube hype, channel a little of the stupidly huge river of popularity into your own development.

I’m excited about the development world at the moment. Probably more excited than ever. We have the tools, we need the nous.

The real resolution I’m talking about is that beautiful event which is much needed within a work environment. Resolution of conflict, tension, undercurrents of nastiness.

Within your workplace, there will be friction. Unless you work totally by yourself, develop for yourself, and talk only with yourself, never communicating with another person. And then, you’ll probably still have friction when the compiler crashes, or the internet goes down (which in turns begs the communication with those people involved with those particular products, which defeats the purpose of bringing up this rather vacuous point).

What I’m putting forward, this almost New Year .. is that we work hard at resolving the kinks. The bumps. It’s not enough to be awesome at what you do. It’s not enough to provide direction and vision for a team. It’s not enough to just plod along.

We have to be more than this. Why? Because we will never be able to work to our fullest capabilities without resolution. Unless we rely on noone (and we know from the above argument how that ends up). So if you do rely on noone, then you might find this post a little boring, or pointless. Nay, never say pointless! Okay.

Some of us inspire. Some of us see the solution faster. Some of us organise extremely awesomely. And all of us are a team. When one part of the team is in conflict (i’ll use this to cover most everything, not just anger towards a particular group member, but any issue, outside or in), we can no longer operate at our best. We are put together for relationships, so when something is slightly off, we internally know. Subconsciously i guess might be a better description.

So for the betterment of the team, we need to put aside our work, and our ability to ignore anything that means we move out of the nice little bubble we got going for us; we need resolution. Whether that is going to the boss. Whether it’s talking to the person. Whether it’s just kicking back (this can be a viable option) and just taking the group to the movies or ten-pin bowling .. or playing the Wii together (what! that’s a viable option).

Sometimes _time_ is what’s needed. So it’s not enough to fix the problem right now (what i generally try to do) .. we might need to slowly work away, tirelessly. Saying hello, making not-work time, or even more .. just being interested.

Now i’m straying into sillyness (spl intended) i think. Work is work. Part of being a team is binding together. That’s what i’m trying to say. Resolution is an important part of teamwork. The ability to bind and grow despite the differences, some of which might never go away.

It’s been over a year now since the word Ajax brightened our lives and made us sound cool dropping it into conversations. What heady days they were! Fine Wine and plenty of Grapes.

Then, along came another phrase (cause it’s two words, kind of). Web two-point-oh, the magical heading that was the gold-plating on the next internet bloom. Or is that boom? Not just us nerds (of the super- and just general type) took a hold of this coin. Big companies, with their big wigs and big chairs and big salaries jumped in and began throwing web 2.0 everywhere. Got a web app? Make it WEB 2.0. Desktop? That too. It’s where the money is. Everyone knows that, you just have to make it Web 2.0 and bam. Rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Along-side these two, parallel another couple. This beautiful pair are actual entities, not just concepts.

Flickr was (and still is) big on the web when the WebJax hit. It showcased some of the excellent qualities of this new charge. Lighthorsemen ride on! Here we have a site that broke free and brought the idea of community and api-isms to the web. Your blog could now be easily showcasing the photos uploaded to Flickr. The main site itself was (is) a hub for people writing history. Putting their lives and big events onto film and then onto the web. It’s a pretty cool imagining of wall-paintings. I like that. Because really, that’s what Flickr is doing. Allowing people to write their own history. Perhaps in years to come, students will study the annals of Flickr as to how things went down. I’m sure some other sites would go in their too. Myspace in particular comes to mind.

Anyway. The other part of the pair (is that alliteration? The following of one word with another of the same starting letter?, must google it to see).

YouTube is, for the previous couple of months, the word to drop. Two guys got together and magically pulled out this site and sold it for at least seventeen ba (BA) zillion dollars. YouTube is, without a doubt, a phenomenon of Ajax and Web 2.0 phrasing (Okay, i went and looked up Dictionary.com just to make sure i was using phenomenon right. Seems like i was. And for that matter, i think i struck out with the alliteration call. Maybe. It’s something about same consonant sound or sound group).

Ahem. YouTube. They are the second.

So my query is this: What will be next? The criteria must be globalised hype, people throwing lots of money around, and a phenomenon that cannot really be partitioned into one neat box.

I’m going to say, that it will be something to do with people. Community. Even more than the current crop is. Even more than YouTube, which already shakes government and brings transparency to a great deal more of our society’s dealings than before.

It’ll be empowering. People will have their own circle of power. Friends. Enemies. It’s possible something like Second Life will be this.

But ultimately, it will be flawed. Until we work out how to solve the problem of inherent chaos that lives within us, any system we build is going to be less than perfect. YouTube has shown the great heights to which we can benefit from it. But also the depths of idiocy (and sadness) people will go to for recognition from just about anyone. MySpace reeks of this too. Great strength, and great weakness. And i’m not bagging the guys who put these things together. That’s an awesome thing. I’d like to be there myself one day soon.

In the end, we are brought low by our own frailty. The inability to perceive truth. To forgive. To be more than petty. We cannot seem to rise above the idea that we are gods, and then, because of reality (what? see how things fall apart when one person considers themselves a god, everyone else can’t be a god, or else we’d have to think everyone else equal and as worth our time as ourselves), other people aren’t. No matter how you take it, you cannot get away from how we are.

Well. That was certainly off-kilter. I never started out with any thought of going on the spiritual offensive. Bam. Interesting journey.

Looking at the last couple of paragraphs, you’d think i was a pessimist. Far from it. I’m not an optimist, because the world is broken. But hope exists. Joy. Love. These things are real, just in a fallen place like our earth they are warped. You find a proper glass to look through, and you’ll see it too.

‘Nuff said and pointed and scraped and offended and judged and all that,

I guess that’s a misnomer. Butterfly’s don’t morph much more than they are .. well, except maybe into compost. So yeah! I’ll stick with the title. It’s a good’n.

Ahem.

After conversing at length (10 seconds at least) with your friendly neibourhood Workmate (John, of ClarionX fame), another change to Dev Dawn was born. I was getting concerned with the fact that the comic would change much less frequently than the (word) posts, and so, with the comic taking up all of the top space on reaching a page, it would deter anyone’s brain (even mine) from looking further.

So I whipped out the [BrainCell of Google-Powered Programming +10] and got to work. A few search entries later, and I stumbled upon a winning (thus far) toggle functionality code. Had to muck it a bit to get the comic to be hidden from the word go, but it works. Kind of.

The _kind of_ explanation needs it’s own dictionary meaning. Or wikipedia at the very least (heh). In my extensive testing (you know it wasn’t) i discovered a peculiar talent that IE has.

Even though the div holding the (many) comic divs is hidden, it continues to load the comic image along with the rest of the page. This is just how it is. However, if, in IE, you click on the Toggle switch while it’s still loading .. BURK .. it stops .. loading. Loading. (I think it was called, _The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down_).

There’s probably a very good explanation for it. But at the moment, I’ll take what I can get.

-_break_-

On the horizon are a few ideas brimming around, possibly like fish, glittering in the ocean, jumping above the waves, out beyond the land. Perhaps nothing will come of them, perhaps something big.

I’m becoming more aware of the ability to make things happen in reality. Too often, I’ve just gone along with what is said. And I still do it, and still will. But in certain .. _spheres_ of my life, I don’t. And in some, I’m learning how to create the waves (to carry on with a metaphor). Well. Not the waves. The fish. If you think fish are ideas waiting to be implemented into fame and fortune. Or waves. Waves could be your thing. Possibly seaweed.